he thought they were only the places where men lived who had
been his factory hands and would be so yet if he had not cut them away:
Ben Torrey, shoveling off his front walk with his boy sweeping behind
him; August Muir, giving his little girl a ride on the snow shovel;
Nettie Hatch, clearing the ice out of her mail box, while her
sister--the lame one--watched from her chair by the window, interested
as in a real event. Ebenezer spoke to them from some outpost of
consciousness which his thought did not pass. The little street was not
there, as it was never there for him, as an entity. It was merely a
street. And the little town was not an entity. It was merely where he
lived. He went behind Buff Miles and the snowplow--as he always went--as
if space had been created for folk to live in one at a time, and as if
this were his own turn.

When he reached the bend from the Old Trail to the road where the
factory was, he understood at last that he had been hearing a song sung
over a great many times.

"... One for the way it all begun,
Two for the way it all has run,
What three'll be for I do forget,
But what's to be has not been yet....
So holly and mistletoe,
So holly and mistletoe,
So holly and mistletoe,
Over and over and over, oh."

Buff, who was singing it, looked over his shoulder, and nodded.

"They said you can't have no Christmas on Christmas Day," he observed,
grinning, "but I ain't heard nothing to prevent singing Christmas carols
right up to the day that is the day."

Ebenezer halted.

"How old are you?" he abruptly demanded of Buff--whom he had known from
Buff's boyhood.

"Thirty-three," said Buff, "dum it."

"You and Bruce about the same age, ain't you?" said Ebenezer.

Buff nodded.

"Well," said Ebenezer, "well...." and stood looking at him. Malcolm
would have been his age, too.

"Going down to the factory, are you?" Buff said. "Wait a bit. I'll hike
on down ahead of you."

He turned the snowplow down the factory road, as if he were making a
triumphal progress, fashioning his snow borders with all the freedom of
some sculpturing wind on summer clouds.

"One for the way it all begun,
Two for the way it all has run...."

he sang to the soft push and thud and clank of his going. He swept a
circle in front of the little house that was the factory office, as if
he had prepared the setting for a great event; and Ebenezer, following
in the long, bright p